On Drawn & Quarterly's Nancy: Vol. 1 (2009)

Oh, you thought that I had already written as much about Nancy comics as any comics blogger possibly could in the last few months? Well, I found another Nancy book, this one on one of the bookshelves in my ancestral home, where it has stood since publisher Drawn & Quarterly sent it to me as a review copy way back in 2009.

I thought it might be worth re-visiting the book, a collection of writer/artist John Stanley's work on the character culled from the comic strip's comic book spin-offs, having just recently read so much of Ernie Bushmiller's original Nancy, not to mention Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden's How to Read Nancy and Bill Griffith's Three Rocks. And attended a two-day event devoted to Bushmiller and his Nancy that those same authors spoke at. 

Simply put, I am much, much, much more familiar with the source material for the comics collected in this book then I was when I was originally presented with it in 2009, and I therefore thought it might be worthwhile to re-read it now (to regular EDILW readers sick of Nancy talk, let me reassure you that this is the last post I have on the subject for the foreseeable future, and the post following this will be almost completely devoted to something you probably better associate the blog with, reviews of DC Comics' super-books). 

The cover design for this beautiful hardcover comes courtesy of Candian cartoonist Seth (Clyde Fans and It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken), who similarly handled the book design for Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts publishing project. Here he highlights the iconographic perfection of Bushmiller's ultimate Nancy design, focusing on her signifiers, like the bow, the weird spiky helmet of hair and the punctuation mark elements of her face (In a new essay in The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller, Karasik and Newgarden show how easy it is to reproduce Nancy's blank, staring face with just a handful of punctuation marks). 

In the three Nancy volumes that followed this first one, Seth would produce another cover providing a similar close-up view of hat-less Sluggo with Nancy icons dancing in his eyes (Volume 3), and then a pair of covers featuring Nancy walking side-by-side with the John Stanley-created character Oona Goosepimple (Volume 2) and then with Sluggo (Volume 4), those latter two featuring the characters in Seth's own, distinct style. All four volumes are part of Drawn & Quarterly's "John Stanley Library", which also included collections of his Tubby, Melvin Monster and Thirteen Going on Thirty. 

Though D&Q's website solicitation copy for the first volume referred to it as "kid-friendly" and a companion to Dark Horse's collections of Little Lulu (and Tubby), the John Stanley Library editions all seem more adult-focused, being handsome, book shelf-ready hardcovers that demand a sense of importance and care in their handling and reading, unlike Dark Horse's digest-sized trade paperback format collections of Stanley's Little Lulu comics. 

As for the comics collected within this volume, they are Nancy #146-#150, presumably of the Dell Comics series, and were originally published in 1957 and 1958. Stanley handled the scripts and layouts, while Dan Gormley finished the art. 

Like many kids comics of the time, each issue was essentially an anthology, with comics of various lengths filling up the space between the covers. Some of these are very short, only a page long, and these function a little like a Nancy Sunday strip, I suppose, while many other stories go on for pages and pages.

That's a lot of space for a Nancy story, given that Bushmiller, in the height of his comics-making powers, worked in extremely short, simple, standalone, several-panel narratives, endeavoring to make each as efficient as possible, with no word, line or dot employed if it wasn't necessary, giving his best visual gag strips a sort of instantaneous impact. (There's a famous quote from Wally Wood about how "it's harder to not read Nancy than to read it.")

Given the panels and pages that Stanley needs to fill, however, this is, of course, impossible (Unless, one supposes, he turned the issues of the comic book series into a Bushmiller pastiche, imitating a collection of Nancy comic strips of his own creation, with each page full of three to a half-dozen two-, three- or four-panel strips.) 

All of that narrative space is enough to warp Bushiller's Nancy into something weird, even off, not unlike what similar comic book spin-offs did (and continue to do) to Charles Schulz's Peanuts (Boom published a Dell Peanuts Archive in 2018, collecting the publisher's Peanuts comics from the 1950s and '60s, and Boom continues to publish comic book-format comics based on the characters). 

The things that fans and aficionados most appreciated about Bushmiller's newspaper strips, then—the aforementioned simplicity, the spare but precise draftsmanship, the instantaneous gag delivery—were pretty much by necessity missing from the contents of the comic books. 

What is there are the core characters and their relationships. Nancy and the rest of the characters from the strips pretty much all look like themselves, as Stanley and Gormley perfectly imported their designs, and it is only infrequently that a certain expression or pose appears that looks too terribly un-Bushmiller-like. 

So Nancy and Sluggo look and mostly move like themselves. There's also Aunt Fritzi, who, true to the comic strip, is drawn in the old glamour-girl style that makes it seem as if she doesn't belong in the same world as Nancy and the others at all. The bully Spike puts in plenty of appearances, as does rich kid Rollo, here given the surname "Haveall" (I'm not sure if this comes from Bushmiller's strip or was an addition of Stanley's; this is the first time I've ever see it). Phil Fumble even makes a brief, one-panel appearance. (The many background characters, meanwhile, all tend to look more like Stanley designs than Bushmiller ones.) 

While these characters and their basic dynamics are all carried over from the comic strip, it is interesting how much Stanley's Nancy reads like Stanley's Little Lulu, both featuring as they do a smart, precocious young girl, with her male best friend/rival/frenemy (with Sluggo in for Tubby), as they have humorous but mundane adventures in a typical, even generic mid-twentieth century small town America (There are even further parallels, if one wants to look, including the fact that Nancy occasionally babysits little kid Peewee, just as Lulu babysits Alvin). 

In fact, reading this was an awful lot like reading Little Lulu, only with different actors playing the characters. 

The stories, due to their length, must obviously forego the sight gag format that Bushmiller perfected, and which his best strips all revolve around, for tales in which a premise is explored and types of gags are riffed on repeatedly until the stories run out of panels.

So, for example, Sluggo takes Nancy ice fishing, and there are a series of verbal jokes centered around Nancy's misunderstanding of various types of fish. Or Nancy and Sluggo attempt to make dinner for a running late Aunt Fritzi and experience a series of mishaps. Or Nancy adopts a big dog, and it causes various acts of trouble. 

Stanley also introduces some original characters, and these are involved in the most dramatic departures from the world of the Nancy comic strip. 

The first of these is the previously mentioned Oona Goosepimple, a creepy little girl who makes people nervous, and who lives in a big, weird house with her witch-like grandmother and her uncle Eek, a mouse-sized man who was shrunk by a rival magician. There are a pair of stories in which Nancy visits Oona's house, and Oona makes a couple of other appearances in shorter stories.

There's also a burglar named Bill Bungle, who appears in a pair of stories with Sluggo. In the first, he sneaks into Sluggo's house in an attempt to rob it, only to end up recruiting Sluggo to help him find Rollo's house. In a later story, Sluggo goes to visit Bill on the day he is to be released from prison, only to find that a weird mishap led to Bill being replaced in his cell by a gorilla.

Coming from a master of kids comics, these are all, of course, pretty good comics, but boy are they different from prime Nancy. If one had access to the older Nancy strips, in which Bushmiller handled the strip as an old-fashioned continuity strip and sent Fritzi and the kids on longer adventures (a handful of which are included in Brian Walker's 1988 collection The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy), it might make for a better comparison to what Stanley was doing with the comic book stories. 

In the end, then, Drawn & Quarterly's Nancy Vol. 1 is good comics...but weird Nancy. 

If you're interested in checking them out for yourselves, it looks like the first three volumes of the Nancy collections are still in stock at drawnandquarterly.com, as is Tubby, featuring a favorite character of mine.